Years ago, as an art major in college, I visited an Adolph Gottlieb exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. A guard pointed out an elderly man moving through the space ahead of me.

“That’s the artist,” he whispered. 

Nervously, and naively, I approached Gottlieb and asked him how long it had taken him to paint one of the canvases.

I don’t remember his exact reply, only the feeling it left me with. He wasn’t interested in talking about hours or days. He was gently teaching me that I’d asked the wrong question.

I’ve thought about that exchange many times over the years. Artists hear, “That must have taken forever!” as a compliment, and while I appreciate the admiration behind it, I’m hoping the observer notices something else—that the eye keeps traveling, that colors seem to vibrate against one another, that a flat surface somehow begins to move.

Only recently have I realized that’s exactly what I’ve been chasing in my own work. My own seeing has evolved through my decades as an artist.

An early exploration excited me in a PowerPoint rendering I created soon after I completed an online color theory class. 

I kept asking myself one question. How could I make felted wool dance?

How could I create visual movement in a medium that is famously flat and still. I played with multiples of this graphic until I landed on an overall pattern that satisfied my aesthetic.

The grid took weeks to complete—choosing fabrics, cutting, marking, stitching. 

Once all the quadrants were arranged to my satisfaction, the large piece lay folded in a cotton bag along with several pillow tops and other unframed pieces… for a full year. Not every project finds a home. This piece I’d lovingly labored over went unseen.

Until Carolyn, my designer, selected it for a featured spot in my new living room in my new apartment in my new home in New Jersey.

She knew it would visually fill an empty wall, a blank canvas for what that room might become. There’d been containers of wool, labored-over color studies, hundreds of tiny decisions, countless moments of doubt, generous feedback from peers, and those long months in storage before she looked at it and said, “That’s the one.”

With her trained eye in command, I went to Michael’s to select the background fabric: a crisp white cotton that would stand out from the light coffee colored wall. 

A neighbor here kindly helped me baste the sewn quadrants to the white cloth, introducing me to a new-to-me product: basting adhesive.

I wanted a narrow border. Carolyn didn’t hesitate. “Go wider.”

She was right.